CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX 1 CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII CHAPTER XXIV CHAPTER XXV CHAPTER XXVI CHAPTER XXVII CHAPTER XXVIII CHAPTER XXIX CHAPTER XXX CHAPTER XXXI Back-Trailers from the Middle Border By Hamlin Garland. Member of the American Academy. Illustrations by Constance Garland. NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1928 All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY HAMLIN GARLAND. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1938. AUTHOR'S FOREWORD The author assumes, he must assume, a personal interest on the part of those who take up this volume, for it is the fourth and closing number of a series of autobiographic chronicles dealing with a group of migratory families among which the Garlands, my father's people, and the McClintocks, my mother's relations, are included. (1) THE TRAIL-MAKERS OF THE MIDDLE BORDER, although not the first book to be written, is the first of a series in chronological order, and deals with the removal of Deacon Richard Garland and his family from Maine to Wisconsin in 1850, and to some degree with my father's boyhood in Oxford County, Maine. He is the chief figure in this narrative which comes down to 1865, where my own memory of him and his world 2 begins. (2) A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER, the second number of the series, is personal in outlook but continues the history of my mother's family the McClintocks, and the Garlands as they move to Iowa and later to Dakota and finally to California. The book ends in 1893 with my father and mother returning to my native village, and the selection of Chicago as my own headquarters. (3) A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER takes up the family history at the point where the second volume ends and chronicles my marriage to Zulime Taft, who naturally plays a leading role in the story. The death of my mother and the coming of my two daughters carry the volume forward. It closes with the mustering out of my pioneer father at the age of eighty-four, and the beginning of the World War. My home was still in Chicago and the old house in West Salem our summer homestead. (4) In BACK-TRAILERS FROM THE MIDDLE BORDER, the fourth and last of the series, I record the removal of my family to the East, a reversal of the family progress. As the lives of Richard Garland, Isabelle Garland, Don Carlos Taft and Lucy Foster Taft embody the spirit of the pioneers so their grandchildren and my own later life illustrate the centripetal forces of the Nation. In taking the back-trail we are as typical of our time as our fathers were of theirs. The reader is asked to observe that only a small part of the material gained in England has been used The method of choice has been to include only those experiences in which my daughters had a share. Just as in the previous volumes I have not attempted a literary autobiography but an autobiographic history of several families, so here I have used the incidents which converge on the development of my theme To include even a tenth part of my literary contacts would overload and halt my narrative. I mention this to make plain the reason for omissions which might otherwise seem illogical. At some future time I shall issue a volume in which my literary life will be stated in detail. My debt to Henry B. Fuller can never be paid His criticism and suggestion have been invaluable, and I here make acknowledgment of his aid My daughter Mary Isabel, has not only aided me in typing the manuscript but has been of service in the selection of material In truth, this is a family composition as well as a family history, for my wife has had a hand in the mechanical as well as in the literary construction of the book The part which Constance has had in it speaks through her illustrations. ONTEORA, HAMLIN GARLAND BACK-TRAILERS FROM THE MIDDLE BORDER 3 CHAPTER I The Lure of the East. WITH the final "mustering out" of my father, a veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic, the strongest and almost the last bond attaching me to West Salem, my native Wisconsin village, was severed. My mother had been dead for nearly fourteen years and my brother, the only surviving member of our immediate family, was a citizen of far away Oklahoma. I now became the head of the western section of the Garland clan. The McCUntocks, my mother's family, were sadly scattered, only Franklin, the youngest of the brothers, remained in the valley. One by one they and the friends who had pioneered with them sixty years before, had dropped away until only a handful of the original settlers could be found. My home was in Chicago. Nothing now held me to the place of my birth but memory, and memory had become but a shadowy web in which the mingled threads of light and dark were swiftly dimming into gray. This was at the beginning of the World War whilst our village, now largely German, was trying very hard to remain neutral In addition to the sad changes in my household, I was fifty-four years old and suffering some obscure disorder which manifested itself in acute cramping pains in my breast and shoulder. The doctors diagnosed my "misery" as neuritis, but none of them seemed able to give me the slightest relief and I faced the coming winter with vague alarm. My daughters were now old enough to sense the change in me (Mary Isabel was twelve and Constance eight), but they remained loyal although I must have seemed to them an ailing and irritable old man. They met me at every return from a lecture tour or a visit to the city, with cries of joy and a smother of kisses. The tug of their soft arms about my neck enabled me to put away, for a time, my aches and my despairs. They still found me admirable and tdok unaccountable pleasure in my company, with the angelic tolerance of childhood. They continued to sleep out on the south porch long after the air became too cold for me to sit beside them and tell them stories. Each night they chanted their evening prayer, the words of which Mary Isabel had composed, and I never heard their sweet small voices without a stirring round my heart The trust and confidence in the world, which this slender chant expressed, brought up by way of contrast the devastating drama in France and Belgium, a tragedy whose horror all the world seemed about to share. My daughters loved our ugly, old cottage, and had no wish to leave it, and their mother was almost equally content, but I was restless and uneasy. There was much for me to do in New York, and so early in November I took the train for Chicago, to resume the duties and relationships which I had dropped in the spring. My wife and daughters were dear to me but my work called. As I journeyed eastward the war appeared to approach. At my first luncheon in The Players, I sat with John Lane and Robert Underwood Johnson, finding them both much concerned with the pro-German attitude of the Middle West. Lane confessed that he was in America on that special mission and I did my best to assure him that the West, as a whole, was on the side of France and Belgium. The Club swarmed with strangers and buzzed with news of war. Many of its young writers had gone to France as correspondents, and others were in government employ. In the midst of the excitement, I was able to forget, in some degree, my personal anxieties. A singular exaltation was in the air. No one was bored. No one was indifferent. Each morning we rose with keen interest, and hour by hour we bought papers, devoured rumors and discussed campaigns. My homestead in West Salem and my children chanting their exquisite evensong, receded swiftly into remote and peaceful distance. In calling on the editor of the Century Magazine, I learned that this fine old firm was in the midst of change and that it might at any moment suspend. As I walked its familiar corridors walled with original drawings of CHAPTER I 4 its choicest illustrations by its most famous artists, I recalled the awed wonder and admiration in which I had made my first progress toward the private office of the Editor-in-Chief nearly thirty years before. I experienced a pang of regret when told that the firm must certainly move. "I hope it may remain," I said to the editor with sincere devotion to its past. One of the chief reasons for my eastern visit at this time was a call to attend the Annual Meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of which I was officer. The first function of the session was a reception given to Eugene Brieux as a representative of the French Academy by President Butler of Columbia University at his home on Morningside Drive, a most distinguished assembly. Brieux made a fine impression on us all He was unlike any Frenchman I had ever met He was blond, smoothshaven and quietly powerful On being introduced to him, I spoke to him in English which he understood very well until I fell into certain idiomatic western expressions These he laughingly admitted were out of his reach. He was very friendly and expressed his deep appreciation of the honor done him by our Institute and Academy. On the following morning he was presented to a fine audience in Aeolian Hall by William Dean Howells, who made a short but exquisitely phrased address Nearly one hundred of our members were on the platform. The stimulation of meeting my friends helped me phys- > ically as well as mentally, and when Louis Betts, the Cbiv.! cago painter, seizing the opportunity of my presence in the city, asked me to pose for a portrait, I consented. He had offered to do this for the Institute at our meeting in Chicago two years before, but this was our first opportunity for doing it. He worked with astonishing rapidity, and at the end of the first sitting told me to come again the next day, As this was Thanksgiving Day and I had an invitation to eat dinner with Augustus Thomas, I was not entirely happy over the arrangement. The best I could do was to go up and take supper. I liked Augustus. He was one of the most alert, intelligent and cultivated men of my acquaintances. He not only instantly apprehended what I was saying, he anticipated what I was about to say Enormously experienced with men and affairs, he was an extraordinarily graceful orator. Although a Democrat of the Jefferson school, he was able to discuss my Republican friends without rancor. An hour with him was always a stimulant. On the following Sunday I heard my friend Ernest Seton give his "Voices of the Night," a new address on wood-craft, to an audience of blind people at the Natural History Museum, a very adroit and amusing talk, for in addition to his vivid descriptions of life in the forest, he imitated certain animals and birds quite marvelously. At the close of the lecture his delighted audience moved out into the lobby where groups of stuffed birds and animals had been arranged for their inspection. To watch them clustering about these effigies, tracing out their contours with sensitive fluttering fingers, was very moving. Betts drove me hard. He painted every day, Sunday and all, and on December first, toward the end of the day, he suddenly and quite positively remarked, "It is finished,"" and laid down his brushes. His words gave me relief. I was tired and one of the last things he did was to paint away the line of pain which had come into my forehead. I left for Chicago the following morning, with a feeling that I was leaving behind me the concerns most vital to me. A sense of weakness, of doubt, of physical depression came over me as I reentered South Chicago New York appeared very clean, very bright, and very inspiring by contrast and retrospect. Zulime and the children were a great joy but to earn a living I must write and all my editorial friends were in the East. During the first week of my return I met with a committee to help organize the Society of Midland Authors, Recognizing in this another attempt to advance the literary side of Chicago, I was willing to give time and thought to it although I felt increasingly the lure of New York. CHAPTER I 5 The war news was now a regular part of each day's reading and no one expected any change for the better during the winter. Nevertheless I determined that my children should not be shadowed by its tragic gloom, and on Christmas Eve I went out with them to buy decorations for the house just as if the whole world were rejoicing. It was a lovely clear winter night and my happy vivid little girls made me ashamed of my weakness and doubt. "Oh I don't see how I can wait till tomorrow," Constance said at dinner, and Mary Isabel was equally eager although troubled by a growing knowledge of the fact that father and mother assisted Santa Claus in bringing presents. I had already smuggled into the cellar a shapely pine nearly ten feet tall, and after the children, highly excited but with resolute promises not to watch or listen, had gone upstairs to bed, Zulime and I set it up and ornamented it. It was a typical snowy Christmas dawn when I arose, and as soon as I had lighted the candles I called to the children as usual Down they came, with shining eyes, just as they had done for seven years in this house, greeting with unabated ecstasy the magical display In a few moments they were in the thick of discovery and quite overwhelmed with the number and beauty of their presents In customary routine, we first opened our stockings, then adjourned for breakfast which was not much of a meal so far as the children were concerned after which we returned to the sitting room to the boxes and packages which formed an ocean of tissue paper and red ribbons With cries of joy the girls began to burrow and in half an hour the room was littered with the coverings which had been stripped off and thrown aside. The war and my small personal perplexities had no place in their world. The day after Christmas we took them to see the opera "Hansel and Gretel." At the end of the first act their cheeks were blazing with excitement. It was the embodiment of all their dreams of fairyland. Connie was especially entranced and on the way back musingly said, "Shall I be a dancer when I grow up?" "No, n I replied, "I think you'd better be a musician." "December 31. With another lecture date in the East, I am getting my affairs in order to leave. The year is going out shadowed by a gigantic war which has involved all Europe but my little family is untouched by it. Tonight just before the children's bedtime, we took our Christmas tree and burned it branch by branch in the grate, uttering a prayer to Santa Claus to come again next year. It was a pensive moment for the children. A sadness mingled with sweetness was in their faces as they turned away. The smell of the burning needles still filled the house with 'Christmas smell,' as Mary Isabel from the stairway called it. 'Come again, Santa Claus!' So our tree vanished but the good things it brought remain behind " "I hate to leave you and the children," I said to Zulime, "but I must go East if I am to earn a living. That is the worst of the situation here. I am doing everything at long distance at a disadvantage " On my arrival at The Players, I learned with sorrow that our librarian, Volney Streamer, had been taken to a sanitarium. For a year or more he had been trying to keep up his work although it had been evident that his usefulness was ended. He had been one of the historians of the club. He loved the library and everything connected with it, and the older members had a genuine affection for him In him many of the traditions of Edwin Booth the founder of the Club had been preserved. There is something impersonally cruel about a club. A man, any man no matter how notable or how essential, can drop out it without leaving a ripple In a few days he is forgotten Occasionally some one will ask, "By the way, where's Streamer? Haven't seen him around here lately." Another will say in a casual tone, "I hear he's down and out. What a pityl" CHAPTER I 6 Day by day my desire to have my family in New York intensified. "If my wife and daughters were within reach of me here I should be quite happy," I said to Irving Bacheller. "It will not be easy to cut loose from Chicago for Zulime is deeply entangled there, but I shall never be content till she and the children are here. I may be mistaken but I feel safer in New York, nearer my base of supplies." I spoke of this again while lunching with Howells who warmly urged me to move. "I like to have you near me," he said, and his words added to my resolution. After we retired to his study he took from his desk a manuscript intended for Harpers Magazine and read it to me. In the midst of it he paused and smilingly remarked, "This is like old times, isn't it, my reading manuscript to you?" and as he uttered this my mind filled with memories of the many-many delightful hours we had spent in reminiscence and discussion during the thirty years of our acquaintance. As I rose to go he gave me the manuscript of his new novel, The Leatherwood God, and said, "Read it and tell me what you think of it " This I gladly undertook to do. Roosevelt, who had his office in the Metropolitan Magazine at this time, asked me to look in upon him whenever I had the leisure. "I come in every morning from Oyster Bay and spend a good part of each day in my office," he said. It was difficult for me to visualize this man (whose reputation was world-wide and whose power had been greater than that of almost any other American) coming and going on suburban trains and in the street cars like any other citizen Notwithstanding his great distinction, he remained entirely democratic in habit. Several people were waiting to see him as I entered the outer office, and I was reminded of my visits to the White House. He was still the uncrowned king. When admitted to his room, I found him looking distinctly older than at our previous meeting. For the first time he used the tone of age. He alluded to his Amazon River trip and said, "I came near to making a permanent stay up there " I urged him to take things easy and he replied, "My financial condition will not permit me to take things easy. I must go on earning money for a few years more." It was plain that the River of Doubt had left an ineffaceable mark on him. He was not the man he was before going in We talked a little of politics and he frankly admitted the complete failure of the Progressive Party. "Americans are a two-party people," he said "There is no place for a third party in our polities." He was hard hit by the failure of this movement, but concealed it under a smiling resignation. In response to his enquiry concerning my plans I told him that I was contemplating the establishment of a residence in New York He looked thoughtful as he replied, "I think of you as a resident of the prairie or the shortgrass country " "I know I belong out there, but I work better here." "There is no better reason for coming," he replied. "What are you working on?" I described to him my autobiographic serial, A Son of the Middle Border, whose opening chapters in Collier's Weekly had not been called to his notice He was interested but reverted to my Captain of the Gray Horse Troop which he had particularly liked, and to Main Travelled Roads which had brought about our acquaintance some twenty years before. The closer I studied him the more he showed the ill effects of his struggle for life in the Brazilian wilderness. The fever which he had contracted there was still in his blood. His eyes were less clear, his complexion less ruddy. He ended our talk with a characteristic quip but I came away with a feeling of sadness, of CHAPTER I 7 apprehension. For the first time in our many meetings he acknowledged the weight of years and forecast an end to his activity. He was very serious during this interview, more subdued than I had ever known him to be. Late in February I returned to Chicago suffering great pain and feeling (as I recorded it) "about ninety years of age. All this is a warning that the gate is closing for me. What I do else must be done quickly." In spite of my disablement, I continued to give my illustrated talk, "The Life of the Forest Ranger." Travel seemed not to do me harm and I managed to conceal from my audiences my lack of confidence. In the intervals, when measurably free from pain, I worked on a book of short stories to be called They of the High Trwls, which I was eager to publish as a companion volume to M am Travelled Roads. I took especial pleasure in this work for it carried me in thought to the mountains in which I had spent so many inspiring summers. How glorious those peaks and streams and cliffs appeared, now that I knew I should never see them again. I recalled the White River Plateau, the Canon of the Gunmson, the colossal amphitheatre of Ouray and scores of other spots in which I had camped in the fullness of my powers and from which I had received so much in way of health and joy. The homestead in Wisconsin was now a melancholy place and I had no intention of going back to it, but James Pond, one of my old friends in Dakota, had drawn from me a promise to speak in Aberdeen and early in the spring of 1915, although I dreaded the long trip, I kept my promise He insisted on driving me to the place where Ordway had been, and also to the farmhouse which I had helped to build and on whose door-step I had begun to write "Mrs. Ripley's Trip," one of the stories in Main Travelled Roads. The country was at its best, green and pleasant, a level endless land, and as we motored over the road I had walked in the autumn of 1881, I found the plain almost unchanged. It was like a velvet-green sea* I sat on the rude low doorstep of the house where the opening lines of "Color in the Wheat" were written, and one of my friends photographed me there. It was well that he did so, for in less than a year the cabin burned down A small snap-shot is the only record I have of the home where my mother lived for so many years and in which my little sister died. Western landmarks are impermanent as fallen leaves Nothing endure* but the sky and the silent wares of the plain. It was a sad revisitation for me. Every one I met was gray and timeworn, and our talk was entirely of the past No one spoke confidently of the future All were enduring with fortitude the monotony of sun and wind and barren sod. "Of what value is such a life?" I thought "One by one these toil-worn human beings will sink into this ocean of grass as small broken ships sink into the sea. With what high hopes and confident spirits they (and I) entered claims upon this land forty years ago'" My stay was short. I could not endure the wistful voices in the unending wind, nor the tragic faces of these pioneers whose failing faculties filled me with dismay. Eager to escape the contagion of their despair I fled to my train, . . . On my way back to Chicago, I stopped off for a day at West Salem to put the homestead in order for my wife and daughters who were already longing for its wide rooms and sunlit porches. My own pleasure in it revived along with a hope of release from my pain "Surely another summer in the comfort and security of my native valley will set me right i Open air and rest and sunshine must restore me to the health which is my due " With several lecture dates in the East, I returned to New York in March, and in my diary I find this entry. "At dinner Mark Sullivan fell to talking of the corrupting effect of commercial magazines. He said, "I exist and my magazine exists like all the others: to make certain products known. It was not so twenty years ago. As we CHAPTER I 8 take on new multiples of subscribers, our field of thought narrows; We have more prejudices to consider. We more and more sacrifice our own taste and ideals. We are standardizing everything, food, clothing, habits and art. We corrupt good writers and illustrators to make our advertising bulletins pay." I give the substance of his talk which showed me plainly that he resented the domination of the advertising department. Notwithstanding my physical disabilities, I kept my places on the several committees to which I was attached and also worked steadily on some novelettes for Collier's Weekly. It was a busy month for me and when I returned to Chicago, it was almost time to take my family to our Wisconsin home. I was as eager to go as they, in the expectation of an immediate improvement in my health. This hope was not realized. Sunshine, peace, the best of food nothing availed. Unable to write, unable to sleep, unable to walk, I sat out the summer, a morose and irritating invalid. I could not even share the excursions which my good friend George Dudley arranged, so painful had certain movements become. I moped and hobbled about week after week until one day my little daughters, extemporizing a stage of chairs and quilts, enacted a play in which I was depicted as a "grouchy old man." This startled me into action. "The only thing left for me is to go East and secure the best medical aid," I set down as a record on the night before I left "It is a kind of miracle that my daughters should still love me in the midst of my savage helplessness and deepening gloom, but they do! They have just been dancing and singing for me, and if it should happen that I am never to see this house again, I shall remember this evening with joy." Precisely what my daughters felt as they watched me limp away to the train on that morning, I cannot say, but my own outlook was one of profound weakness and distrust. To remain was an admission of defeat. To go on required all the resolution I possessed. CHAPTER I 9 CHAPTER II Moving Picture Promises. ONE of the tasks to which I was returning and one which promised immediate reward, was the revision of a manuscript which Mark Sullivan, editor of Cottier's Weekly, had requested. It was the second part of a manuscript called A Son of the Middle Border, upon which I had been at work for nearly six years and of which Collier's had already printed several chapters "In spite of the changes wrought by the war, this serial is good material," Sullivan wrote, "and I shall use the remainder of it as soon as I can find a place for it," and so, just before my fifty-fifth birthday, I took this manuscript and some short stories for which I hoped to find a market and set forth to retrieve my fortunes. My stop-over at my home in Chicago was short, and to Henry Fuller who came in to stay with me for a day or two, I bluntly stated my plans. "My days of pioneering in an esthetic sense, as well as in a material way, are over," I said in substance. "My father's death has broken the bond which held me to Wisconsin and I have no deep roots here in Chicago I intend to establish a home in the vicinity of New York. It is not without reason that my sense of security increases with every mile of progress toward Fifth Avenue. Theoretically La Crosse should be my home. To go into western history properly, I should have a great log house on Grand-Daddy Bluff with wide verandas overlooking the Mississippi River; but Manhattan Island is the only place in which I feel sure of making a living and there I intend to pitch my tent. "Furthermore, in going east, I shall be joining a movement which is as typical of my generation as my father's pioneering was of his In those days the forces of the nation were mainly centrifugal; youth sought the horizon Now it is centripetal Think of the mid-western writers and artists, educators and business men who have taken the back-trail. Howells and John Hay began it Edward Eggleston, Mark Twain dud Bret Haite followed. For fifty years our successful painters and illustrators have headed east. I am now definitely one of this band I shall have some trouble in getting Zulime to pull up stakes in Chicago, and the children will miss the old home, but its abandonment must come sooner or later I can't have them growing up*here in Woodlawn West Salem is no longer American in the old sense and will soon be a narrow bound for them a sad exile for me Hardly any of my father's kind remain." To all this, Fuller, who as a native of Chicago with a wide knowledge of the Old World had been its most caustic critic, gave approval "Get away while you can. I'd go if I could " I spoke of the Cliff Dwellers, a club I had originated in self-defence at a time when there was not in all the city a single meeting place for those interested in the arts. "See how the literary side of it fades out. One by one its writers have gone east Architecture, painting, sculpture and music are holding their own, but our fictiomsts and illustrators with no market in Chicago have nothing to keep them here. Their sales, like mine, are entirely in New York. The West has never paid me or published me and in this period of sickness and trouble I feel the need of contact with my fellows. "Aside from these advantages, I like New York. It feels like a city. It is our London, our Paris, our national center as they are racial centers. All, or nearly all, the publication of every sort takes place there. To live I must sell my lectures and my stories and the East is my market place." Fuller listened to all this with admirable patience, smiling at my attempt to justify a course I had already decided upon, and made only one adverse remark. "It might be well to wait and see what the war is going to do to the literary market." CHAPTER II 10 [...]... motion the unseen agencies by which the books were delivered from the stack to the reader, the element of magic was added to the beauty of the halls Noble as the Library was, beautiful as the White House appeared to them, these granddaughters of the Middle Border were not satisfied They insisted on seeing Mount Vernon and I was glad of their interest It offered something more moving than beauty It was their... to them as a veritable palace in fairyland Washington did not disappoint them They paced the marble corridors of the Capitol with awe but their delight in the Library was keener They found it the Palace of the Frost King, vast and splendid Its arches, its vivid coloring, its echoing vistas overwhelmed them with their glory, and when the keeper of the palace came from his royal chamber to conduct them... never really known the lower part of the city As a family we paced the Battery walk, visited the Aquarium, and took the ferry to Staten Island On South Beach these mid-western children saw the salt-sea waves come tumbling in to die along the sands To them these watery forms were as mysterious as the winds, but they were eager to wade Awed at first, they paddled in the foam, and tasted the spray to prove... and sweetly to whatever experience or new adventure their Daddy provided From this apartment as a center, I led them forth from time to time in search of such parts of the city as their mother and I thought would have most value to them Through their eyes I recaptured something of the magic with which the Palisades, the tall buildings, the shipping and the subway had once held for me To Zulime it was... predict whether the dominant success is to be fiction or history or verse CHAPTER VI 34 My Son of the Middle Border made no wide appeal To the few who knew and loved the homely phases of American pioneer life, this plain story of a group of Western homebuilders moving from the settled lands of the East to the open lands of the West was of interest, but the great public had no interest in it Furthermore,... the sea On our return trip while passing the Statue of Liberty I asked, "Aren't you glad New York is to be your home?" and they replied, "Yes, Daddy It is beautiful." From our flat it was only a step to the Hudson River, and every evening we all went out to the head of a long pier to watch the sunset colors fade from the sky The vista to the north, always beautiful, was never twice the same What other... Home in New York IN the midst of our sightseeing, I was called upon to make the Commencement address at the State University of Maine and so spent several days in the land of my ancestors, for this part of the State was filled with Shaws, Robertses and Garlands "It is the northeast Border, as Wisconsin was the Middle Border in 1860," I said to President Aley "I feel the strength of the pioneering types... confident of their delight in it As they came by boat to Catskill, they had the tremendously dramatic experience of a ride up the Inclined Railway, which lifted them to the summit of the pass, through a tumultuous thunder-storm, an almost terrifying adventure, but when they reached me at the door of our new home, it was in the delicious hush of sunset after rain The scent of buckwheat bloom was in the air,... resembled the instantaneous shift of scene brought about by an oriental conjuror, but they reacted to the beauty of their surroundings with such joyous intensity that I was entirely content The long piazza, the great trees, the lawn and the mocking birds, enchanted them It was like living a poem, one which embodied the noblest life of the South, and when that night we all sat out on the broad steps in the. .. something mystically sad as well as sweet came with our singing The flooding moonlight, the odor of plants and shrubs, the shadows of towering elms, the dimly seen river and the lights in the town below suggested some part of the romantic history of the place CHAPTER III 18 As we sat on the steps in the moonlight, the whole scene was so mystical, so ethereally beautiful that I said to Mark, "All we need to . BACK-TRAILERS FROM THE MIDDLE BORDER, the fourth and last of the series, I record the removal of my family to the East, a reversal of the family progress. As the. GARLAND BACK-TRAILERS FROM THE MIDDLE BORDER 3 CHAPTER I The Lure of the East. WITH the final "mustering out" of my father, a veteran of the Grand